How Syngman Rhee’s success led to Korea’s division
As implied in the title of David P. Fields’ book “Foreign Friends: Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea,” it offers a new interpretation of one of the most controversial topics in the study of modern Korean history: the division of Korea in 1945.
In addition to serving as a biography of Syngman Rhee’s life before 1945 and narrating a history of the Korean independence movement in the U.S., the book also highlights the ways in which Rhee invoked the idea of American missions in front of American audiences in order to gain their support.
Rhee himself was a beneficiary of American missionary work in Korea. He was saved from blindness as a child by Western medicine and educated at the missionary-run Pai Chai Mission School. There he was converted to political liberalism which led him to participate in a campaign to reform the monarchy. As a result of this agitation he was arrested and tortured for months. He later converted to Christianity.
After his release in 1904, he went to study in the U.S. While there he met with President Roosevelt and, invoking the “good offices” clause of the 1882 treaty between the U.S. and Korea, asked Roosevelt to lodge a complaint on Korea’s behalf at the Portsmouth Peace Conference that ended the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. Roosevelt’s failure to do so helped pave the way for the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, and would later be cited by Rhee as the first act of appeasing Japan that led to Pearl Harbor.
The book documents how Rhee began using church networks in the U.S. to give speeches during this period, but it was after the March 1 Movement in 1919 that Rhee was pushed into a flurry of activity as the first president of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea. Rhee helped establish the Korean Commission to America and Europe on Aug. 25, 1919, in Washington, D.C. This lobbying group successfully inserted Japanese brutality in Korea into the debate over U.S. entry into the League of Nations and unsuccessfully sought Korean representation at the 1921 Washington Naval Conference.
The Korean independence movement may not have led directly to the liberation of Korea in 1945, but in addition to highlighting a number of forgotten successes, Fields clearly lays out the challenges faced by the movement due to its members being dispersed across several countries, which made it difficult to stay in touch with each other, let alone the masses in Korea.
In 1941, Rhee published the book “Japan Inside Out” that predicted an attack by Japan on the U.S., and Rhee was soon proven right. In his public lectures and lobbying after Pearl Harbor, Rhee claimed it was Americans’ moral responsibility to make up for the past by recognizing the Korean Provisional Government, which could provide manpower to fight the Japanese in Korea. This message garnered support from the public, but the State Department, worried about how allies like China and Soviet Union might react and wishing to avoid a possible post-war entanglement, balked at the idea.
Mixing biography with diplomatic history and writing with a transnational focus, Fields compellingly places both the Korean independence movement and the division of the Korean Peninsula in a new light. While complaints can be made with the way the epilogue peters out at the end, this is an otherwise concisely written, well-researched, and persuasively argued book that is recommended to anyone interested in 20th century Korean history.